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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Looking Up Vertical Search Lines

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:20 PM

Vertical search refers to search engines designed to return results from very narrow or specific information or business sectors. Search tools that focus on a tight regime of information have existed for years. There are plenty of examples that already exist such as the highly successful book-search engine, AbeBooks.com, or the various job and career search engines like Monster.com. Name a business sector and you can likely find a search tool designed specifically for that sector. Vertical search is not a new idea however branding it as an essential type of search engine is. To quote the respected blogger, Om Malik , "You can't go two steps on Sand Hill Road , the epicenter of venture capital without some money man espousing the virtues of vertical search."

LookSmart Looking Before Leaping
Seeing the growing interest in Vertical Search, LookSmart has introduced five new vertical search engines, each of which draws from LookSmart's database. Focusing on teens, students, families and women, these vertical search features are a way for LookSmart to test the waters of this market without actually reinventing its brand. For teens and college students, Teenja.com , GradeWinner.com and 24hourscholar.com provide information and entertainment options targeted at three distinct youth markets. Parents can find information on child raising, nutrition and entertainment options for families at ParentSurf while the busy mother-on-the-go can find information for time-stressed moms at GoBelle .

These five vertical search engines will soon be available on one page via LookSmart's web-community Furl. After the user finds information using one of the five new vertical search tools, Furl users can save content to a personal archive and easily share that information with others. Furl is also a social network with topical archives built on recommendations from its members.

"LookSmart believes that search on the Web will become increasingly vertical and personal. Consumers turn to the Web in search of essential content be it related to a hobby, work or education," said Debby Richman, senior vice president of consumer products for LookSmart in a recent press release. "The new verticals were developed to build upon LookSmart's core demographics of researchers and families from the company's existing consumer products, FindArticles and Net Nanny."

Why Vertical Search is Important
Traditionally, search engines are thought of to be general information resources from which a wide range of information can be extracted based on general keywords. As the Internet becomes more populated with both users and content, a migration from general information sources to specific information sources is natural. Trying to find a used car of any type using Google's general search engine is like trying to find a grain of sand in a glass vase. A search engine dedicated to used cars on the other hand would likely guide the user to more accurate information faster than a general search tool would.

This sort of thinking makes a lot of sense when you stop to think about it. Why should I arrange my travel plans, (a major investment of a critical two week period in an otherwise work-a-day year), using a general, commercialized search engine when faster and more specific alternatives are emerging? It seems rather like buying an off the rack suit when a tailored one is available for a similar cost.

This might be a mistake however. While the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves) are considered by many to be "general search engines", each of them offers some form of vertical search features.

Back in the autumn of 2003, Yahoo was bragging about expanding its Vertical Search features through the integration of Yahoo Shopping results with Yahoo search results.

Local search, a feature offered by nearly every major search engine is considered a variant on the concept of Vertical Search. By narrowing the field of results to a relatively small geographic area, local-search features offered by the major search engines make a mountain of information into a well-mapped molehill. Each of the majors offers some form of localized search, and each is expanding ways to help users narrow their search results to find information as quickly as possible.

As a measure of how seriously the major search tools are taking "vertical search", Google currently lists seven management level jobs in its emerging Vertical Search division.

Search engine users should expect to see a wave of sector-specific search tools emerge in the coming months. A lot of money is being pumped into smaller companies and start-ups to create search engines for unique companies or business sectors. The big search engines, which already offer vertical channels under different names, will start to re-brand those various channels as Vertical Search tools.

Businesses and search engine marketers should watch emerging search tools and the established search engines to see if they or their clients can benefit from the growth of this sub-sector of search. There is nothing wrong with more consumer options and an expansion of the marketing tools offered by the Internet. Ultimately, it will be the users who determine if Vertical Search tools are viable as businesses. If they are, great interest will continue to rise. If they are not however, Newtonian rules will apply. Any object that goes up in a vertical line, will come down in a similar vertical line.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:20 PM.

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Analyse This! - Google Buys Urchin

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:20 PM

Google has purchased San Diego based web analytics firm Urchin for an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock. Urchin is a web site analysis tool that allows users to study the habits of site visitors in order to get a better view of what they are doing when they visit a particular site. Understanding the experiences of site visitors allows webmasters to track the performance of their websites and better optimize content to meet the wants and needs of those visitors. Currently, Urchin tools are available as hosted services (run from Urchin.com), software packages (run from user's computer), or as the default site-stat service offered by many larger ISPs.

Google plans to make Urchin stats available to website publishers and AdWords advertisers. "We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

As a feature for AdWords advertisers, Urchin analytics will let search engine marketers know exactly how viewers react to specific landing pages. For example, if sales are bad but visits are very high, perhaps a minor redesign of the page will help convert sales.

Similarly, organic placement advertisers can track how a site visitor moves from the Home page (the most likely to achieve numerous placements) through the site. This information might make all the difference between a commercially successful business site and one that produces the income of a part-time job.

If Google opens Urchin up for both AdWords and Organic placement advertisers, chances are it will become a standard tool for measuring and analysing user behaviours, at least for SEO and SEM practitioners.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:20 PM.

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CGI Holdings Growing Rapidly, Now Think Partnership Inc.

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:13 PM

Mirroring last year's rounds of conglomeration in the search engine industry, the search engine marketing (SEM) sector is seeing a round of mergers, acquisitions and newly minted partnerships.

Leading the way is Illinois based Think Partnership Inc. (TPI), formerly known as CGI Holdings. CGI was already the biggest player in the search marketing world, owning the world's largest SEM corporation WebSourced, which in turn operates Andy Beal's KeywordRankings.Com, SEO firm Global Promoter, online shopping mall World Mall, and low-cost ISP CostEffective Holdings.

TPI recently purchased UK-based SEO Mike Grehan's Smart Interactive giving them a toehold in the rapidly growing British and European search markets. Before the name change, which was announced in February, CGI picked up the highly respected search engine optimizer and site copywriter, Heather Lloyd Martin as its new director of search strategies.

In December 2004, CGI merged with PPC Marketing firm Proceed Interactive, an announcement that was shortly followed by a January merger with full-service ad agency MarketSmart. To round out its series of services, TPI acquired two independent affiliate marketing firms, KowaBunga! Marketing and PrimaryAds earlier this month.

The growth of TPI marks a huge leap for the search-marketing sector and sets them as one of the primary drivers within the industry. SEOs and SEMs should watch to see how they mix and match service lines, at least as they relate to search engines. Industry watchers will be looking to see how services are offered, if an economy of such scale can produce savings for advertisers, and how the concept of Think Partnership might affect the rest of the industry.

Regardless of the effects, a huge note of congratulations should go out to the players who made this massive series of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships possible. It must have been an awesome experience.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:13 PM.

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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Search Industry Maturing again...

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 5:01 PM

This has been yet another week of tremendous change in the search sector. Several announcements competed for space with each other over the past seven days, each of which adds to the growing tapestry of services that comprise the search-marketing metaverse.

The search engine marketing industry has evolved as users began to take advantage of new features, tools and innovations offered by search engines. An example of previous evolutionary periods would be the emergence of pay-per-click advertising and the attendant rise of search-marketing firms specializing in AdWords and Overture. As long as there are methods for finding and retrieving information in digital databases by using keywords or similar identifiers, there will be a search-marketing industry. How that industry operates in the future depends on how the search engines operate and how consumer-tendencies evolve.

Will the Butler Go Big?
The biggest story was the $1.85-billion acquisition of Ask Jeeves by InterActiveCorp (IAC), the online vertical-sales empire built by Barry Diller. Ask Jeeves is considered the fourth most influential search firm however it remains firmly in the shadow of the Big-3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN). IAC owns many of the largest Internet properties including, Hotels.com, Expedia, Ticketmaster, CitySearch and Match.com. It also owns the Home Shopping Network and is finalizing the purchase of the massive US catalogue retailer Cornerstone Brands. The addition of an Ask Jeeves powered search box to every one of IAC's websites is expected to be the first obvious effect from the acquisition. Another almost instant effect is the sudden increase in the relevance of Ask Jeeves. The sheer size of IAC and the number of additional services that can be offered under the Ask Jeeves brand will almost certainly increase their user numbers, which have held steady around the 5% mark for almost two years. The addition of a fourth entity to the current "Big-3" would add more diversity for search engine users as Teoma (the actual engine that powers Ask Jeeves) uses a unique and very accurate ranking algorithm.

As Ask Jeeves becomes more relevant to search engine users, it will in turn become more relevant to search engine optimizers. This is encouraging because like MSN and Yahoo, Teoma places far more weight on site-content and relational linking than it does on the sheer number and relevance of links like Google does. With three of the largest four search engines more interested in what a site says than what its link partners do, the art of SEO copy-writing might replace the artful dodge of link-spamming as the "trick" consumers associate with SEO.

Expanding Real Estate Through Better Technology
The activity of the first three months of this year has started to change how most users relate to search. The Internet is fundamentally a user-driven environment. While the possibility exists that a thousand geniuses hunched over their keyboards might produce something as powerful as a Shakespearian script, that something is useless if Internet users don't adopt it. When Internet users do choose to adopt a new technology or product, they tend to do so in droves, thus fundamentally changing the environment. A recent example would be the rise of the Bloggosphere. Three years ago, most journalists had never heard of bloggers. Today, so many bloggers consider themselves journalists the face of journalism has changed.

For search marketers, environmental changes borne by the mass adoption of new technologies can be both boon and bust. Historically, the rise of Google changed the practices of the search engine optimization sector by forcing link-building as an increasingly complicated component in most campaigns. The rise in popularity of Blogs gave search marketers a lot of new real estate to play with which, in turn, forced Google to lower the importance of Blogs as an information source in its index. Google is only one example of how a chain-reaction of change affecting the search sector can cause a chain of events effecting the larger Internet environment.

Another example is the pending emergence of audio and video files as components of search. Each of the Big-3, along with AOL and Ask Jeeves is interested in capitalizing on commercial video and/or audio content. This is a realm where two forces dictate the actions of the search engines. The first is trend lines being drawn by Internet users including a rise of interest in pod-casting, video-conferencing/education, and image/video sharing. The second force is the ability (and willingness) of advertisers to adapt their online-marketing channels to meet new technical challenges.

The days of a website being a picture that contained a thousand words are long over. Today's successful websites can be found using a multiple number of search-tools such as; image search, local search, video search, audio search and organic search. A successful search-campaign also involves making sure a reference to the site is virtually forced on users through contextual advertising programs such as Overture and AdWords. The establishment of a corporate blog for clients is the last step of a highly sophisticated search marketing campaign. By offering better technologies, search engines offer marketers much larger tracts of real estate to work from. User adoption of many of these technologies pushes search marketers to figure out how to best use them as well.

Moving to Mainstream
Ultimately, the effect of user adoption of new technologies makes the Internet an increasingly important tool in most people's real-life experiences. Many grandparents who witnessed the birth of the automobile and air-travel adopted Email to stay in-touch with grandchildren who often live hundreds of miles away (another example of social change borne by the mass adoption of technology, several generations ago). Many suggest if the grandparent phenomena didn't manifest the way it did, AOL would never have grown, CD-duplication might not have evolved so quickly, and makers of real drink-coasters wouldn't have gone out of business. The point is a massive group of users made AOL important by becoming early adopters of the service. AOL became mainstream because a huge chunk of the market adopted AOL. A similar phenomenon is happening in the search engine marketing industry.

Over the past two years, the world of big business became very active participants in search marketing. Vague interest had existed in previous years however search was seen as a chaotic world that could rarely be quantified in a board meeting. It was the rise of Overture and AdWords that put "search" in the center of corporate radar screens. Pay-per-click advertising became a dominant business model simply because mainstream business managers saw a system they could fully understand. Even though PPC tends to cost more and produce poorer results than organic placements, corporate advertisers continue to buy-in to a system they can easily explain to others. The adoption of PPC by major advertisers has had a highly beneficial effect on the long-term business of search but a somewhat detrimental effect on the short-term business of search marketing. The amazing distribution of paid-search advertising through contextual delivery programs (such as Google's AdSense or Gmail and Overture's Content Match), made PPC advertising appear to be a multi-basket carrier for the eggs of corporate advertising. While corporate advertisers might have adopted PPC advertising, Internet users, for the most part, have not. A culture-gap in the adoption of search-technologies now exists between advertisers and consumers with large amounts of money poured into paid results users tend to click far less often then they do with organic results. It is also the reason many Fortune1000 companies are not found in the Top10 organic results under keywords relating to their products or services.

This culture-gap has led to a shift in the thinking and strategies of search engine marketers. When examining how search engine users work with search results, it has been noted that user's eyes follow an F pattern. Searchers look up and down to mentally rank results and then closely examine the Top5 organic results before their attention trails to those "below the fold" and the PPC results that tend to appear to the right hand side of the screen. This user behaviour, combined with a tendency to heavily research before purchasing, is the cornerstone of the emerging Search as Branding concept of marketing. This concept states that search is simply another form of advertising, taking advantage of one or more increasingly mainstream information channels to express a message on behalf of a client. While it might be a more sophisticated medium, it is still a mainstream medium where what works and what does not work is dictated entirely by the users. The key to the Search as Branding theory is repeated placement across as much real estate as possible.

As the technology behind search matures, so does the industry serving businesses using search as a means of advertising. Business is growing in the search sector as innovation spurs innovation and change begets change. Clearly, Internet users are about to be presented with a revolution of information and entertainment options, some of which will change the very nature of how our society relates to finding and retrieving information. The search marketing industry thrives on real estate and the ultimate effect of the evolution of search is a larger share of much more interesting real estate to work with.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 5:01 PM.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
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Controversy Dogs Google

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:55 PM

The first three months of 2005 is turning out to be a cursed quarter for the PR department at the Googleplex. This week, the public spotlight focused on Google News for two less-than-honourable mentions.

First, Google News has been forced to remove materials from Agence France Presse (AFP) after AFP filed suit against Google for displaying image and text content copyrighted to AFP. Google News was also informed that any use of copyrighted materials would be considered further infringement on AFP's copyright and would add to the current $17.5-million AFP is seeking in damages. Google has managed to remove current stories generated from AFP however it caches news articles for up to 30-days.

Next, Google News hand-selects its sources. While an algorithm based on publishing popularity chooses which articles are found under which keyword phrases, the news-authority sources themselves are supposed to be pre-screened by a human. That is what makes the recent appearance of two white supremacist (neo-nazi) propaganda sites so troubling to readers and Internet watchers. One site is the in-your-face racist National Vanguard which openly represents hatred against Jews, persons of colour and anyone else who doesn't fit a narrow Arian mould. Another is the ultra-right wing German National-Zeitung website that calls for expulsion of "... all criminal foreigners." German tech-magazine de.internet.com spoke with Stefan Keuchel, a spokesperson for Google Germany. Here is a quote from Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped,

"We received a lot of emails in the US from people who thought it wasn't too great 'National Vanguard' is included." But Google itself was politically neutral and wanted to offer its readers information from a variety of different sources. Keuchel continued to say: "We are respecting existing laws. If something turns out to be illegal, it will be immediately removed."

In Canada, such material is covered by Federal Hate-Crimes legislation, a topic of a recent parliamentary sub-committee. The sub-committee made news last week when it recommended that Canada's strict, long-standing laws regarding hate-literature should be better enforced in light of the advancement of the Internet.

Google can't seem to catch a break, even in the timing of Canadian parliamentary committee reports and the appearance of neo-Nazi websites as legitimate news sources. Given the fact that Google has (PhD for PhD) the most educated staff on the planet, one is left wondering if there really are laws of Karma and exactly where Google is sitting in regards to such laws.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:55 PM.

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Yahoo fires latest salvos in Search Engine War

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:50 PM

Yahoo has been on an upgrading spree recently with a major acquisition, two major upgrades and a beta-release of a new blogging tool. It's no secret the execs and techs at Yahoo have been working overtime to re-brand and upgrade Yahoo's various services. Yahoo has made several major announcements over the past four weeks, a measure of how active they have been recently. Here is a quick rundown of the four major announcements made in the past seven days.

Over the weekend, Yahoo completed its purchase of photo-sharing software developer, Flickr. Based in Vancouver BC, Flickr offers users an all-in-one storage, publication and sharing package for digital photo albums. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Yahoo plans to continue operating Flickr as a stand-alone while it works to integrate its technologies into its various search features. Flickr staff will be moving 1600km south from Vancouver to Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale later this year.

Along with its purchase of Flickr, Yahoo is upgrading two user-loyalty services it offers in competition with rivals Google and MSN.

Late Tuesday, Yahoo announced it would be quadrupling the storage space for Yahoo Email users from 250-megs to 1-gig starting in mid-April. The increase places Yahoo beside Google in the online Email storage size war. One year ago when Google released its beta version of Gmail (with 1-gig storage), both Yahoo Mail and MSN's Hotmail only offered 4-megs per account, an amount that each provider quickly upgraded to their current 250-meg allowances.

In a separate announcement, Yahoo also released the newest version of its desktop search software. Yahoo Desktop which is licensed by X1 Technologies will now be able to access Yahoo Mail documents along with conversations held using Yahoo Messenger (instant messaging application).

By expanding the functions of its Email and desktop search features, Yahoo is trying to even a few of the playing fields Google currently dominates. Another field is the growing bloggosphere where Google's Blogger is the most popular blogging software owned by one of the major search engines.

Last week, Yahoo released a beta version of its own blogging tool, Yahoo360, which blends long-term Yahoo features such as Internet radio (audio-blogs), IM and photo sharing (to be enhanced by Flickr).

This has been a good week for Yahoo. It has seriously upgraded its feature services and, as search engine user stats released yesterday by Search Engine Watch attest, is holding its position against Google and MSN in all fields. Perhaps Yahoo can gain some ground now that some of those fields are being leveled.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:50 PM.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Neilson Net Ratings - Search Share January 2005

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:50 AM

Search Engine Watch receives regular statistics on search engine usage from Neilson Net Ratings. Neilson Net Ratings gathers data from over one million Internet users in the United States with Neilson software installed on their home and work computers that records every site visited. Measuring three unique metrics, these stats provide a present and historic view of search engine usage.

The first series of stats shows the approximate number of searches at a particular search engine each month and the percentage of overall usage that number represents. These numbers represent the total number of times a search engine user searched directly at each engine.

Google still rules with 47.1% of all searches conducted at Google.com (1.923-billion searches in Jan2005). That number is down from a May 2004 survey which showed 56.4% of users going to Google.com first.

Next comes Yahoo with 21.2% of all search activity conducted at Yahoo.com (868-million searches in Jan2005). This number is consistant with May 2004 figures.

Third comes MSN with 12.8% (523-million), up from 9.2% in May 2004.

Rounding out the Top10 come:
AOL: 4.7%,
Netscape: 1.8%,
Ask Jeeves: 1.8%,
MyWay: 1.4%,
iWon: 1%,
EarthLink: 0.9% and
My Search: 0.8%

Next, SEW lists stats on the number of times searches are conducted over engines that own multiple brands. For instance, Yahoo owns AltaVista, Overture and AlltheWeb, while Ask Jeeves owns iWon, MyWay, Teoma and My Search.

Google: 47.1%
Yahoo: 21.2%
MSN: 12.8%
AOL: 6.6%
Ask: 5.1%
EarthLink: 0.9%

The last series of stats is called the Search Provider View. These figures measure which search engine actually powers which percentage of results. Not every search tool generates results from their own database. AOL for instance, purchases results from Google, as does Netscape, iWon and Excite.

Google continues to drive the most search results with 55% of organic listings and 60% of paid-listings.

Yahoo comes in a distant second with 21% of organic listings and 34% of paid-listings.

MSN is third in organic results at about 13% but currently does not have a paid-listing program.

Ask comes in fourth with just over 5% of all organic search results generated from the Ask/Teoma database.

For more information, please visit the full Danny Sullivan article at: Search Engine Watch

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 9:50 AM.

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Monday, March 21, 2005

InterActiveCorp Acquires Ask Jeeves for $1.8-billion

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 2:11 PM

Ask Jeeves has been sold to Internet media conglomerate InterActiveCorp (IAC) for nearly $2-billion. Rumours about the sale, which started circulating early Sunday with a short story in the Wall St. Journal, were confirmed this morning by both IAC and Ask Jeeves. The transaction, which is worth $1.85-billion in stocks, represents the largest search related sale in the past two years.

Ask Jeeves has had a strange history. Starting as a natural language search engine that attempted to match specific questions with precise answers, they quickly moved to being a keyword-triggered search engine. Their famous mascot, Jeeves the Butler has served the firm for most of its life, with a brief retirement four years ago, and is one of the annual attendees (in hot-air balloon format) in New York's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Jeeves stands in front of Teoma, the brains behind Ask Jeeves. Generally regarded as one of the best algorithmic search tools available, Teoma (which is owned by Ask Jeeves) provides the search results displayed by Ask Jeeves. If it wasn't for Google's hold on name-brand popularity, Teoma might well have emerged as the #1 search engine. Ask.Com has been rumoured to be working on a paid-performance search tool to rival Yahoo and Google. The purchase also includes Ask Jeeves brand properties, Excite, Ask.com, and iWon.Com.

IAC owns a number of Internet businesses including the popular online travel business Expedia, which it plans to spin off sometime this year. It also owns the Home Shopping Network, Hotels.com, Citysearch Web Directory, Ticketmaster, and the online mortgage provider LendingTree. The acquisition of Ask Jeeves gives IAC an entry into the rapidly growing search engine market with ownership of the world's fourth most popular search service.

Earlier this month, IAC indicated it would purchase Cornerstone Brands, a massive Internet and catalogue retailer for a rumoured $720-million. Ownership of Cornerstone would give IAC further entry into the consumer retail market with a wider variety of products and services.

The purchases of Ask Jeeves and Cornerstone Brands, combined with IAC's already heavy ownership of several sector-specific search services raises concerns that Ask Jeeves will be transformed into a vehicle for IAC vertical content, to the exclusion of other search options. From a business perspective, it would make sense for travel searches to return Expedia-generated results. Ask Jeeves CEO, Steve Berkowitz commented that the merger will permit users to "search, find and complete a task all within the boundaries of one company." From a search perspective however, such a move would likely backfire as it did for Lycos two years ago.

Investors welcomed the purchase, with Ask Jeeves shares climbing 14% at the opening of trading today. Increased confidence in Ask Jeeves might be attributed to other moves IAC and its CEO, Barry Diller have made lately. Diller has long been known as an entrepreneur willing to spend large sums of money to buy big-ticket websites selling directly to the consumer. His strategy appears to be working. Last month, IAC announced sales of $6.2-billion across its stable of websites in 2004, a 15% increase over 2003 sales. This morning, IAC also announced the opening of a gift-recommendation search engine as a competitor to Amazon called Gifts.com.

By combining its various services under the same URL, "Ask Jeeves", IAC is betting online consumers will naturally migrate to the place that offers everything, "...within the boundaries of one company." It currently owns many of the Internet's most active web properties, some of which have been operating since before the tech-crash five years ago. They are most certainly anticipating a migration of search users towards sector-specific "vertical" search tools such as Gifts.com, Hotels.Com and whatever comes from their pending purchase of Cornerstone. Ask Jeeves and IAC had already jointly entered the local-search market with IAC's Citysearch powering Ask Jeeves' local search option.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 2:11 PM.

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Friday, March 18, 2005

Bad Business - The Sad State of SEO Perception in the Mainstream Media

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:02 PM

Die-hard baseball fans have spent the past few days watching heavy hitters like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire testify in front of a US Congressional sub-committee about the use of steroids in baseball. That the world of professional athletes is deeply enmeshed with performance enhancing drugs use is not really a shock for most people. Compounding their need to perform as well or better than their competitors, there are tremendous commercial and financial pressures placed on athletes in our culture. Civic economies are affected by the performance of their sports teams. Multi-million dollar endorsement contracts are awarded to star athletes. An increasing number of athletes are falling to the temptation to boost their performance with artificial assistance. Every major professional league in North America has been contaminated, calling the ethics and integrity of professional sport into question. Based on a few recent articles appearing in the mainstream press, the SEO/SEM world is risking a similar censure.

Yesterday, an article by Adam Pennenberg ran in Wired Magazine under the title, "Search Rank Easy to Manipulate". The piece focused on Greg Boser, CEO of WebGuerrilla, a search marketing firm in Ventura California. Boser has represented the 'dark-hat' side of the industry at search conferences and is candid about his use of tactics that nearly everyone else in the sector tend to shy away from. The article, which is a must read for anyone who wants to defend the SEO sector in the future, also mentions link-density tactics used by SEOInc and Submit Express that rely on obtaining thousands of links from seemingly unrelated sites, including, "... cheesy guest books, online diaries, blogs, zany products, porn sites and anyone who honors link exchanges ..." The article sums itself up by noting a few other techniques used to fool search engines, including cloaking, blog-link spam, and doorway-pages. It concludes with Boser's statement on spam, "It's any site that ranks above mine."

After reading Pennenberg's piece, one might be led to believe that search engine optimization is entirely about manipulating search results by deception. This view is obviously held by long time tech writer Tom Foremski who equates SEO with "black magic" in his recent SiliconeValleyWatcher entry,"The purity of search results challenges Google and offers an opening to rivals". Foremski has been writing about tech issues since before some of us were born so let's not dismiss his ideas too quickly. His article actually touches on a familiar lament for many SEOs; the results at Google have been horribly tainted by the massive interest in PageRank exploits. Foremski does mention that there are ethical SEO firms but the thrust of his thoughts goes towards manipulation of Google by the "...few bad ones that have given SEO a dodgy reputation."

Both writers miss the point about search engine optimization and both make a number of assumptions that are simply not based in the reality most of us work in. At the same time however, both point out one of the greatest challenges the sector faces as it and the search-environment mature. The SEO industry is facing a distinct lack of credibility in the mainstream world. Like the taint of steroids in baseball, the lack of credibility isn't news to most in the sector; it is a bit of a setback though.

For years, many in the SEO industry have tried to demystify our sector to combat the "dark-arts" myth. Starting with the granddaddy of search-journalism, SearchEngineWatch, a growing number of publications give our 'secrets' away for free, everyday. SEOs are not magicians but a rather motley mixture of good writers with technical knowledge. There is no hidden text, slight of hand, or weak links in our chains of success, just very hard, focused work. As an SEO, I spend more time trying to figure out how a particular client's server is set up than I do thinking about how Google's are. Realizing how important long-term credibility is to the growth of our sector, several SEOs have taken individual and associative stands on SEO Ethics though no standard definitions or common codes of conduct have been adopted by the industry.

Nick Wilson, editor of search-focused ThreadWatch.org notes this in his posting, "Search Marketers Divided, Time for New Definitions?" Wilson sees two distinct types of SEOs, one of which uses aggressive algorithm manipulation, the other using search friendly design and content. He correctly suggests, "Although both groups call themselves Search Engine Optimizers, it's been clear for many years that neither group considers the other to be part of their own." Wilson makes brief points about both groups and offers an important disclaimer for the necessity of generalizing in his explanations. He sums up his post with a call for clarification, one which was echoed by well known SEO Scottie Claibourn when writing about Pennenberg 's Wired piece, "It's this quote that bothers me, "An entire industry of search engine optimizers, called SEOs, has sprung up, many of which take advantage of loopholes in the way rankings are calculated." Again, lumping SEO's into the "taking advantage of loopholes" category and ignoring the fact that many of us make real improvements to sites, removing technical obstacles, improving navigation, targeting in on better keywords, and actually building content worth linking to. Oh, silly me... it's all about loopholes and buying links... I've just been doing it the hard way, I guess."

There is a deep divide in the organic side of the search marketing industry and mapping the edge of the ethical abyss is often seen as a matter between practitioner and client. There are serious penalties for failing to note the edge of the ethical abyss as clients of a couple of well known SEO-Spam shops found out last year when they slipped and fell out of Google's index.

Even though the penalties are harsh, some SEOs continue to use dodgy if not outright deceptive tactics as, for the most part, it is the client not the SEO who suffers most in the end. It is important to note however, most SEOs don't use deceptive or illegal tactics. Most are honest hard working combinations of writers and techies who feel a comparison with Web Guerrilla is like comparing a cattle-rancher with Jessie James. Stories of gross manipulation of search engine rankings through deceptive tactics do not serve the honest in our industry well.

The search marketing industry is almost ten years old. So far, only a handful of initiatives have been taken in forming industry associations. The first, SEMPO has recently elected a new board of directors and is again starting to release studies and whitepapers. Two others, the SMA-UK and SMA-NA are struggling to emerge.

This will be a decisive year for many in the SEO sector. The stakes are getting higher and the practice is getting harder. SEOs are cautioned to stay away from use of deceptive tactics. The temporary gain one might get from cheating and spamming is much like the temporary high baseball had two years ago when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were chasing the Home Run record. All highs end, and like with our home run hitting heroes, the bigger they become, the harder they fall.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:02 PM.

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View this Article Only: Bad Business - The Sad State of SEO Perception in the Mainstream Media

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Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Corporate SEO Preparation

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:44 PM

Understanding the value of global communications, nearly every organized organization in the world has a website. From grassroot community groups to major corporations, the World Wide Web has expanded by billions of websites over the past half decade. Because the medium is easy, cheap and absurdly flexible, it has become the backbone of a "people's global communications network".

Seven years ago most corporate CEOs saw the Web as a secondary communications device, a brochure rack of sorts. The brick and mortar sector was wary of the over-hype but wise enough to pay some attention regardless. Five years ago, the glass-sky fell in the dot-com crash of 2K. Since then however, the web's amazing usability has interwoven itself throughout our social and business networks. In today's tech-driven information society, the web participates in almost every aspect of the product cycle for virtually every product from crop-seed to aircraft.

Large companies are just now starting to recognize the wisdom behind a full spectrum approach to search engine marketing and the marching orders seem to have gone out to the marketing divisions. There has been a notable increase in both SEO/SEM outsourcing and in-house hiring of search marketers over the past few months. Before embarking on a major search marketing campaign, large companies should consider a number of options, obligations and potential obstacles. Once you know you want to embark on an SEO campaign, you should know you will need to budget sufficient resources to support it.

Like any other corporate endeavor, a search marketing campaign involves a high degree of cooperation and communication between different divisions ranging from the boardroom to marketing to IT to the mailroom. The marketing department and the wholesale purchasing department in a retail-based business might both take a great interest in the shopping cart section of the corporate website, which is the traditional domain of the IT department. What are the chances that anyone in any of these departments specializes in the relatively new field of search engine marketing?

March like ducks
Ensuring everyone shares an understanding of their roles and responsibilities in regards to the website is an essential first step. Many corporate websites are now designed to provide a direct conduit to consumers as opposed to acting as a simple brochure site. Examples include the travel sector, large retailers, home electronics and the home entertainment industry. In the past five years, each of these sectors has transitioned from typical brochure websites to direct-to-consumer information/sales sites, and businesses in each of these sectors rely on a number of different people performing different tasks in the organization. This is why many firms are starting to hire an seo consultant or bring on an in-house specialist. Internal education is the key to turning your SEO from a harried cat-herder into a mellow mother-duck.

Listen to your genius
As the separate but similar fields of SEO and SEM are both becoming more complicated, good practitioners need good support networks. Many SEOs working for large organizations spend most of their time teaching sales, marketing, finance and legal departments about SEO. Sales and marketing personnel need to learn how to write search engine friendly content. Finance needs to understand the intricacies of bid-per-click systems and the necessity to make funds available.

After hiring an SEO consultant, it is important to actually listen to the genius you've hired. As a moderator in a SEO web forum geared for techies, I read about a number of experiences from both in-house and contracted SEO and SEM practitioners who just can't seem to get the various departments to listen to them.

One brilliant SEO who was hired by a large east-coast firm lamented that work she performed one week would be consistently written over the next. She would complain about it to her boss (who managed the IT division), but the problem persisted for months until something was done. Not only was this demoralizing for the SEO, it obviously prevented the site from achieving as many strong rankings as it could have if the over-writes had not been made. As it turned out, someone in the marketing department was updating based on information from the wholesale purchasing manager and it wasn't dealt with until a new corporate policy was devised and debated, months into what should have been a strong SEO campaign. What the marketing and purchasing departments failed to grasp is unlike an easily changeable paid search advertising campaign like Overture or AdWords, getting strong organic (free) listings requires patience. Strong communication between the SEO and all divisions responsible for onsite content is also required.

Understand your audience
After ascertaining a corporate order and work-plan for the SEO campaign, the first thing a good SEO will want to do is figure out what he or she is marketing and who it is being marketing to. This stage involves a great deal of research into products, their uses and what consumers have to say about them. Quite often we find the words or terms used by the companies we serve are somewhat different from the words or terms used by their customers. Keyword selection is one of the most important phases of an optimization campaign. Your SEO will likely want input from every division involved in a product or service. When working for a very large company, a good SEO is interested in how manufacturers, vendors, consumers and competitors describe products. Large campaigns can involve days of tedious keyword research to hone in on the most beneficial keywords to target. Large firms should be prepared to offer their SEO support for this research. The IT department for instance should provide server-logs to the SEO. The marketing department should supply as much sales materials as possible. Other departments or divisions should be canvassed for their ideas on product descriptions as well. Chances are, everyone in the organization will share many terms but also have task-specific terms for products or their components.

Allow for change
Organic SEO relies on titles, text, links and spider-accessibility. Changes to a corporate website often necessitate several meetings to work out messaging, presentation and design. To achieve strong rankings in the organic listings, the changes recommended by your SEO are almost certainly vital; otherwise the SEO would not have suggested them. Large organizations can prepare for these changes by budgeting staff time in advance. Your SEO will want to affect a number of issues ranging from on-site factors such as site structure to off-site factors such as link building.

Give the SEO time to perform
Time expectations can be frustrating for SEOs when working with corporate organizations. While paid-advertising can offer a virtually instant road to the front page of a search engine, organic results take weeks or even months to achieve. These results can only come after the SEO has had time to perform his or her initial optimization work on the site and has seen site modifications uploaded to the server. Once the original optimization work is uploaded, it might take up to three months to see a Top10 placement. For very large sites, chances are the SEO will do their hardest initial work on the index page and the main pages of each section in the site while giving the internal pages a light SEO update. After their first pass at the site is complete and they are satisfied a spider will be able to move from one end to the other without obstruction, they will upload the modifications to the host-server. They will then start to concentrate on the internal pages individually, a process that doesn't actually have an end point but becomes a constant task for the SEO. After a few months, the SEO will take a second pass at the initial work to fine-tune the optimization as much as possible in order to achieve or shore-up Top10 placements. The important things to realize are that a) it takes time and b) it is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and maintenance.

A measure of success
The last basic element a large organization needs to have in place before embarking on an SEO campaign is a way to measure the success of that campaign. There are some in the SEO/SEM industry who insist the only measurement is return on investment. There are others who believe that a measurable increase in traffic (regardless of sales) is the best measure. There is a third stream of thought that says that site placement is the goal and that is the ultimate measure of success. From the point of view of a corporate marketer, each of the three measurements has validity and each has limitations.

Return on investment is probably the most important but least practical of the measurements. Research from within and from outside the SEM industry shows that search marketing is more about branding and recognition than it is about direct sales. Like a television commercial or magazine advertisement, consumers see search results as a form of advertising. It is very difficult to determine the ultimate factors that push a consumer to decide to make a purchase but we do know that availability and familiarity are the two most important factors on the web.

An increase in site traffic is another way to measure the success of a campaign. This is probably the best of the three as it is affected most by the SEO's choice of titles and descriptive text. Sites with Top10 placement can expect to see a dramatic increase in site visitors. If the SEO writes attractive titles and strong text, and those titles and text appear on a search engine results page, chances are that title and descriptive text helped push the visitor to the site. Site traffic is a good long-term measurement of success for an SEO campaign.

The best measure of short-term success is actual site placements. An SEO is hired to achieve the strongest organic placements possible. SEOs are not in charge of making sales or designing the best possible product to sell to the public. The actual audience for SEOs is a small number of electronic search spiders. Good SEOs can get your site in the Top10 if given sufficient support and resources. That's what they were hired for and that's how they would like to be measured in the short-term. In the long run though, most SEOs would agree that their real goal is to increase site traffic by making the site appear more often under an increasing number of keywords.

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Gmail Going Live April 1st

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:39 PM

According to dozens of Google-watchers, Google's ad-driven email system, Gmail is slated to move from beta to live-status on Friday April 1st, one year after it was introduced to a limited number of testers. On its first day, many thought Gmail was an April Fool's joke.

To establish the initial beta-test group, Google issued a number of initial invitations to a very small group of users that day. It also sent each of those users six invitations to send to friends who where also issued six invitations with their beta account. Gmail grew its potential test group by a factor of six every time it gave away a new beta-account. For the past two weeks, Google has been randomly inviting users of its search engine to sign up for Gmail accounts with a discreet link that appears for about 1 in 100 users.

Gmail is one of Google's most successful new ventures offering users a few features rival programs Yahoo-mail and MSN's Hotmail simply can't match.

First of all, Gmail offers users up to 1-gig of free storage space, making it useful as an online filing cabinet of sorts. Once the realm of text based messages, Email has become the most common means of transferring various files from one computer to another. These messages are growing in size as Internet users and their personal technologies become more sophisticated. Today's typical email message is often hundreds of times larger (by data volume) than a typical email message two years ago with images, music clips and cell-phone generated movies moving through they system.

Next, Gmail has an excellent search feature that efficiently interacts with Google's Desktop search tool. Following the principle that information is information regardless of the media, Gmail and Google Desktop combine to make a deceptively simple but very powerful information management resource.

The last feature Gmail offers is more of a price than a privilege. Gmail serves as a billboard space for AdWords advertising. Ads appear to the right of the text much like they do beside Google's search engine results. Ad distribution is based on keywords or word-groupings found in the text of emails, which means active scanning each piece of mail sent through Gmail to determine which ads to serve to each user. For SEOs and SEMs, Gmail offers a personalized glimpse of how Google matches ads with text. It also offers a lesson on how powerful Google's AdWords program can be. If millions of users start to use it, Google gains billions of new units of temporary real estate to display AdWords on. Try to imagine the number of ads you might be served each day if you were a Gmail user…

Gmail currently enjoys the dominant position in the use of email as an advertising deliver system. It gives Google's AdWords program another advantage over rivals at Overture (Yahoo) and MSN but that advantage may only be temporary. Both Yahoo-mail and MSN Hotmail seem ready to match Google gig for gig and ad for ad in the near future.

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MSN Enters Paid Search Market

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:37 PM

MSN has added a second pillar to its new search division and a new threat to rivals Google and Yahoo with today's introduction of its own paid-advertising program, MSN Paid Search Solution.

Contextual, keyword based paid-advertising is the largest revenue generator for both Google and Yahoo. This morning Goldman Sachs greeted MSN's entry into the field, which is projected to be worth over $5Billion in the next three years, with an "outperform" rating for Microsoft.
Microsoft feels this is important to them. In an interview with John Markoff in today's New York Times (reg. required), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, "…having an independent advertising system is strategically vital."

MSN is not rolling this feature out in North America just yet. It still enjoys a profitable relationship with Yahoo's Overture, which currently provides contextually driven advertising support for the MSN search engine, a deal that doesn't expire until June 2006. MSN will be testing its new paid-advertising program in France and Singapore over the next six months.

Microsoft is touting its massive user information database (and its willingness to allow marketers to tap into it) as a competitive advantage. Being the dominant technology firm for almost two decades has allowed Microsoft to accumulate a tremendous amount of personalized data about its users such as age, income, gender, and product interests. It also knows a lot about regional and national demographics.

If allowed to tailor advertising based on a wider range of personalization options, marketers have the ability to better profile groups of recipients. A simple example might be sending luxury cruise information to zip-codes known to have higher numbers of retirees and spring-break specials to zip-codes around colleges. The possibilities are mind boggling.

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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Google News Feature

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 1:29 AM

Google has introduced a new feature to Google News that allows users to customize the layout and content of the news page.

A link appears in the top right corner of the news page prompting viewers to "Edit this customized page". The link leads to a drop down that gives users the opportunity to shuffle the placement of story topics and generate on-page items based on keywords entered. After saving a user's customized preferences, the News site is re-arranged in the configuration that works best for the user's self-set interests.

This is a cool addition to Google news making it much easier to track and follow news articles on specific topics and faster to find the ones you're most interested in.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 1:29 AM.

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Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Beware the Ides of March

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:02 PM

Google on the March - And the beats go on...

Google is generating a lot of bad-vibes these days, having crossed the perceptual line between good and evil on a number of fronts. In less time than it took for their options to mature, Google's new attitude has started turning formerly loyal users into critics and once slavish investment analysts into detractors. Google, which until very recently was the darlink of the search world is quickly losing its cool among the key groups it needs to support it.

Monday had to be one of the worst days in recent memory at the Googleplex in Mountain View California. They entered the week ducking questions about the widely-reviled Auto-link feature included in their new tool bar. The anger and sense of betrayal felt by webmasters and search marketers is difficult to articulate in words I haven't already used but if it was described as a colour, it would be blood-red.

If a growing anti-Google rebellion amongst webmasters wasn't troubling enough, Google got caught using "dark-hat" SEO techniques on its own site, a violation of the own SEO Guidelines that stunned the "white-hats" and emboldened the "dark-hats" in the sector. Even though Google has since banned those pages from its own index, in a show of good faith, the taint of "Do what I say, not what I do" remains.

Worse still, the investment community is starting to turn on them. Earlier this month, Google was called a one-trick pony by Charlene Li from Forrester Research. That must have stung but an even worse name was hurled by Kevin Kelleher in the respected investor's newsletter The Street. In his March 7 column, "Google's Grating Silence" Kelleher notes Google's lack of guidance or investor communication, calling them hypocrites at the end of the piece. This is not a good situation for Google. Though it does not create a three-pronged Perfect Storm for disaster, the past three weeks have seen Google's reputation take the biggest beating it has ever taken.

This beating comes on the eve of its great rival Yahoo's announcement of a competing contextual advertising program and rumours of an entry from MSN into the lucrative field.

For Googlites:
Definitions of inauspicious on the Web.

It's the year of the rooster folks. This is a terribly inauspicious entry for a company commanding such cool technology. Time to stop monkeyin' around, eh?

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Nextaris - Time and Task Management Tool for IT Workers

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 8:45 PM

They say that time is money in the business world. As truisms go, the statement is true enough. It was also once said that computers would be time saving devices. The second statement, as any beleaguered IT worker will tell you, is simply not true. Computers, as time saving devices, continue to belong in the flying car category of science-fiction based reality simply because time cannot be saved, it can only be managed. Even though my colleagues and I labour under an executive team I consider to be among the smartest managers in Canada , the whole firm is working longer hours than ever before. My time is therefore not saved but it is very well managed. The computer allows me to accomplish far more in a day than my extremely talented Father could just one generation before me. At least he had the luxury of punching-out at 5 every afternoon in his comfortably hectic eight-hour per day, five-days a week world. Today, we live in an expanding 24/7 universe with change flying as fast as the electrons we push. To effectively manage time in a cyber-world that never sleeps, one needs to rely on electronic assistants and tools.

Nextaris , the new content-management service from Menlo Park firm SurfWax is a toolbox for online publishers, content creators, design teams and developers. According to the copy on its site, Nextaris is "an all-in-one set of web-based tools for searching the Web, capturing content, saving/sharing files, publishing blogs, messaging and networking ." The goal was to create a dashboard application, one that subtly changes the way users relate to searching and retaining content from the web. After establishing a free account, Nextaris users are able to set up several types of public and/or private files, the content of which is stored on the Nextaris server. The filing system allows users to surf the web and save specific content such as news-clippings, images, site copy, and source-code. Users can then sort through their saved files to determine information to make public and which to keep in secure folders for sharing with selected contacts or work-team members. The toolbox is an online application that does not require users download or install new files (though there is a clever drag-and-drop java installation required).

Ease of use is important for SurfWax CEO Tom Holt. Believing that information is best remembered and shared through contact groups or knowledge nodes, Holt has some simple advice for new users. "Start with the photo albums. Upload a few photos to share with family and friends."

After experiencing how easy it is to use the application, Holt feels new users will quickly appreciate the ability to save snippets of news-clippings or entire site-copy containing information they'll need later or wish to share with their contacts. As an example, StepForth will be using Nextaris to publish an internal news and info update (sorry, staff only) two or three times a week. The toolbox will allow us to store and archive what we consider to be important SEO related information, and share that information with each other without deluging ourselves with email-memos as we tend to do now. Nextaris provides "sourcing" information automatically, thus saving me the seconds required to enter the information manually. According to Holt, the goal was to make a system where users could, "...save specific snippets of content, a more efficient way to 'bookmark' portions of pages. Likewise Nextaris Images will show just images you've selected." Another feature is the Nextaris News Accumulator which works much like Google's News Alerts but also saves a copy of the article for future reference.

The Nextaris system allows for the saving of images, site copy and source-code. By enabling users to select groups of co-workers, family or friends to update when new content is added to a file, Nextaris makes an excellent collaborative and networking tool. A feature that will be easily appreciated by new-comers to the web is that Nextaris does not require users to purchase storage space as an ISP would. It allows users to establish accounts and publish for sharing via the web without learning HTML or a more complicated CMS.

Perhaps the strongest feature of Nextaris is the one that binds the others together in a publishing format, the Blog creator. Users of the Nextaris system can easily create and upload content to a Blog-space. A setting allows for news-clippings to be instantly added (and sourced to the original with a back-link) to the user's Blog as well as being added to other shared or private folders. With the growing popularity of Blogs seen in the corporate world, the Nextaris system provides an easily adaptable environment to learn and publish quality content from easily accessible files.

In their offices, the SurfWax staff has been using Nextaris for news and collaborative file-sharing for the past few months with great success. For search engine users, researchers, designers, developers and publishers, Nextaris provides a number of one-click solutions to the problem of information overload. This tool helps manage the only virtual resource a good programmer can not create, time. As the mixed metaphor says, time is money and every penny managed is a half-penny earned.

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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

MSN Down

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:10 PM

The MSN search engine went down for a short period today. Web, News, and Incarta searches were disabled for at least fifteen minutes around 4PM pacific time. They are all back up and running as of this writing.

screenshot: msndown-030705.jpg

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Monday, March 07, 2005

Goofy Goings on at Google

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:11 PM

Google can be seen as one of the great magic-mirrors of the Internet, reflecting vast sections of content back to its users based on their immediate interests as stated through their searches. The existence of magic makes for an interesting and often spiritually laced discussion that is best held outside the realm of business. A mirror, on the other hand, is a physical object that, at least once in its existence, was treated as a commodity. If you break it, you've bought it, and we all know the mystical fate that befalls those unfortunate enough to break mirrors.

This is what makes Google's recent behaviour so mystifying. Why would one of the world's most important companies, which enjoys one of the best corporate reputations ever established, take such serious risks with its credibility? Is Google, as a mirror, cracked, or is the gild simply wearing off the back leaving a barren transparency of well-cut glass?

Google has attracted a lot of attention over the past six years, the vast majority of it being positive endorsements of Google's extraordinary search capabilities and the simple elegance of the AdWords/AdSense contextual delivery system. For the past two weeks however Google has received scant praise and a great deal of criticism, some of which is seeping out of the Net and into the real world. Two issues have dominated and a third is brewing in the background. Webmasters inherently dislike the auto-links feature included in Google's new toolbar. The anger generated by the new toolbar might account for a lack of comment from webmasters on a recent article in which investment analysts publicly speculate Google is a risky one trick pony. To top off a bunch of bad press, the SEM analyst community over at ThreadWatch has caught Google using SEO tactics that violate its own Webmaster Guidelines, the document many base "SEO Ethics" on.

Trust and the Art of Alteration
Google operates the world's most popular search engine that is used more often by more people than either of its major rivals, Yahoo or MSN. Hundreds of millions of people type Google's URL every day when seeking products or information on the Internet. Its users have come to expect fast and relevant results and are apt to trust Google to deliver them an honest listing of sources from the Web. This is what Google does best and their popularity makes them a "trusted-source' for each of those searchers. Very few of those users would ever expect Google to knowingly and actively alter the information expressed on websites found through its vast index. The auto-links feature of their new tool-bar does exactly that.

It has been two weeks since the introduction of the third (beta) version of their popular tool bar. Google, one of the most known and loved brand names on the Internet is quickly burning bridges with the webmaster community as, it pushes forward with the auto-linking feature embedded in the toolbar. Literally hundreds of well known search marketers, writers, forum contributors, bloggers and independent webmasters have condemned auto-links. This feature, in case you've missed the controversy, will automatically add links to a website viewed while using the toolbar, without the permission of the original site designer or site owner. While the auto-link feature is designed to activate by a limited number of triggers such as an ISBN number (link to that ISBN at Amazon.com) of a book or a street address (link to a generated Google-Map for that address), content creators around the world are furious. Some see this as the thin edge of a wedge that could put independent operators effectively out of business while others fear expansion of the current feature or even worse, adoption of the concept by rival search firms.

The controversy has not yet spilled over into the mainstream media, however it has become a dominant issue in the SEM world, spurring a widely circulated petition, dozens of Blog entries, the creation of Auto-Link busting code, and this angry but humorous 12-minute video. It is no longer a matter of "if" the mainstream media covers this story but "when and how" it covers it. Google knows it has a problem with the auto-links feature however, the real world sometimes demands we choose between two evils. Google's other big problem is found in the mainstream world and it could spell evil for investors and stock valuations. Google was called a one-trick-pony. Ouch...

A One Trick Pony?
The other day, respected investment analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research called Google a "one-trick pony". Google generates almost all of its revenues from paid-search through the AdWords and AdSense programs. For almost a year it has reached out to Fortune1000 companies in a bid to entice them into buying more ad space but at the beginning of March could only boast about 230 clients from the world's top 1000 corporations. In the eyes of the investment community, dependence on an ad-model that only 23% of the Fortune1000 buys into marks a major weakness in Google's revenue chain. Being a "one-trick pony" might not be a bad thing if your pony's trick is consistently winning races. As Motley Fool editor Rick Aristotle Munarriz wrote, "It's true that Google is riding a one-trick pony when it comes to paid search -- but it's such a nimble jockey." That thinking only works in optimal track conditions of course. Forrester Research projects a slip in the growth rate of paid-search advertising this year from the 45% growth seen last year to about 30% in 2005.

Coupled with the growing webmaster discontent as outlined above, the track Google's "one-trick pony" runs on may be getting worn and rutted. Even the most nimble jockey needs to take great care when running on a difficult track.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Juvenal 160 A.D.
But who is to guard the guards themselves? The growing discontent felt by webmasters who depend on Google listings was heightened today with the discovery that Google may use tactics it punishes others for. The highly popular ThreadWatch.Org posted several proofs of Google using cloaking and keyword stuffing on pages originating from the Google domain. Cloaking is the dark-art of serving one version of your site to visitors and another to search engine spiders. In its Webmaster Guidelines Statement, Google states quite clearly: "Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects." Check out the titles in the two examples of the same Google AdWords page cited here: Visitor View Cloaked View

Cloaking is considered deceptive, especially when used in conjunction with another dark-art SEO tactic, keyword stuffing. Take a second look at the titles used on the two example pages listed above. The overuse of the word traffic (traffic estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic), in the title is blatant SEO spam and is considered punishable by banishment from Google's index. At least that's what we have been telling StepForth clients for years. We have seen Google ban sites that used cloaking and/or keyword stuffing and have helped clients get their sites back into the Google index after suffering such fate. For SEOs who wished to follow the "ethical" path as defined to a large degree by Google's Webmaster Guidelines, seeing Google use these tactics is like watching your Boy-Scout leader hot-wire a truck. When the "black hats" in the sector are done howling with laughter, it is only a matter of time before they start to use similar tactics again. After all, Google does it.

Conclusion
Some mystics say our lives evolve in seven-year cycles. Larry and Sergey have had an amazing seven years since they first devised Google's predecessor, "BackRub". Perhaps their psychic pendulum is swinging away from guaranteed success or, perhaps they are simply making a series of really dumb decisions in Mountain View. Regardless of the reasons, Google is playing fast and loose with its own reputation and in an environment as image conscious as ours, that behaviour is not only dangerous, it is potentially deadly. On the Internet, you are always one click away from oblivion. With Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves doing as much or more for their loyal users than Google, one wonders where the tipping point lays.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:11 PM.

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Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The mainstream media, circa 2014

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:11 PM

With the New York Search Engine Strategies Conference in its final day, the search news this week has been quietly dominated by Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. One of the themes at this year's SES conference is Blogging, Public Relations and the Media. In light of interest in Blogs, the media and search, we are pleased to bring you this spot of infotainment.

A somewhat disquieting eight minute short film made by a psychology student at the Georgia Institute of Technology is being passed around SEM related forums today. EPIC2014 offers a short history of how advances in search technology effected mainstream news reporting. As the film is set in the future year 2014, much of the "history" is speculative though the pre-2005 history is accurate.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:11 PM.

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Ask Jeeves now powers Lycos Search

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:10 PM

Ask Jeeves and Lycos today announced a deal in which Lycos will begin displaying search results generated by the Ask database.

Ask Jeeves results, which replace listings generated by Norway's FAST Search and Transfer Company, began showing on Lycos early this morning. Both Ask and Lycos are struggling to compete in a sector dominated by Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Ask Jeeves is considered by many in the search sector to the the fourth most important search engine boasting highly accurate results along side an innovative paid-ad distribution system. Jeeves is on a growth spurt, hoping to gain a larger share of the search market over the coming two quarters.

Lycos is in what appears to be a re-building phase. Until yesterday, it received its results primarily from FAST and Looksmart. Last week, Lycos announced a deal that combines the databases of four well known online dating sites as part of its growth upgrade. Acquiring listings from Ask Jeeves will help Lycos credibly brand itself as an alternative to its much larger rivals.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:10 PM.

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Yahoo! Turns 10

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 3:14 PM

Ten years ago today, co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo took their 31,897 page Internet database known as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" and incorporated a web-directory named Yahoo. (first Yahoo page) A decade after changing the world, Yang and Filo sit atop one of the most successful IT firms with one of the most recognizable brand names, Yahoo.

Yahoo is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Filo and Yang settled on the name after consulting a dictionary to find the definition, "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth", suited the oft-earned reputation of Engineering students who, as anyone who attended a university knows, tend to party hard.

Yahoo actually hit the web a full year before the company was first incorporated. Starting it as a self-motivated project at Stanford University, Electrical Engineering PhD. students Filo and Yang borrowed a campus trailer, networked their workstations and started keeping track of web pages that interested them.

At first, Yahoo was housed entirely on the two students' personal computers, both of which were named after Sumo wrestlers. Yang's computer, named Akibono, held the growing directory. Filo's computer, named Konishiki, held the software that made Yahoo run. They compiled long lists of sites, trying a number of ways to catalog their lists so they or their friends could easily find them without having to resort to using keywords. Eventually they broke their lists into categories and when the categories became too large, into sub-categories. The world's first easy to use search directory was thus born.

Yahoo was among the first Internet properties to grow solely by word of mouth. Within six months of its conception, over one hundred thousand unique users per day were visiting Yahoo. Filo and Yang found themselves spending more time working on Yahoo than they did on their studies. On March 2, 1995, Filo and Yang registered their name, incorporated a company and started visiting venture capitalists in the Silicone Valley. After meeting with dozens of potential backers, the duo came upon the offices of Sequoia Capital, a VC firm that had previously invested in Apple, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. In April 1995, Sequoia invested $2 million, fueling a chain of events that would have wide-reaching effects throughout the burgeoning computer industry.

Buoyed by Sequoia's initial investment, Filo and Yang started headhunting their management team. They first hired industry visionary and fellow Stanford engineering alumni Tim Koogle away from Motorola. Aside from defining what Yahoo is today, Koogle played a pivotal role in saving Yahoo from demise after the stock crash of 2000. After hiring Koogle, Yahoo snatched Jeffrey Mallett away from the very successful division of Novell he headed, WordPerfect. Novell was never able to recover from the loss of Mallett and WordPerfect lost the word-processor market to Microsoft's less functional Word.

The team of Filo, Yang, Koogle and Mallett would soon grow. Six months after receiving their initial investment from Sequoia, two other major investors, Reuters and Softbank came on board. Six months after that, Yahoo launched a very successful IPO which generated approximately $33,800,000 and was supporting a staff of 49.

In June 1996, Yahoo changed its strategy by signing a deal to use Alta Vista as its primary search engine. Before this point, Yahoo had presented itself as a directory. When Alta Vista burst on to the scene as the first algorithmic search engine, the Yahoo management team decided that joining them was much wiser than trying to beat them thus forming the foundation for the type of cooperative competition that ran much of the search sector until early last year. Aside from providing users with a faster and larger database, the deal allowed Yahoo to offer advertisers the option to place ads beside the Alta Vista generated results appearing on its pages. This was the first search-advertising deal that formed another foundation for the growth of the industry.

Since then, Yahoo has ventured where few firms ever could. Being the first real search firm, Yahoo has a growing number of "firsts" it can brag about. For instance, it was the first to bring TV content to search-users (1996), first to develop Local Search (1996), first to offer direct market-finance content (1997), first to merge search and news aggregation (1997), and the first Internet firm to displace television as the main information source of the modern age (also 1997). These "firsts" came in Yahoo's first two years of operation. Since then, they have taken the lead more often than not in trying new ideas and introducing new initiatives. Until the rise of Google in 2001, Yahoo was the king of search content.

As a business, Yahoo has weathered several rough patches, the worst of which came in early 2000 when the bottom fell out of the tech-market, virtually decimating neighboring firms in the Silicone Valley. At this time five years ago, Yahoo stock was trading at the astronomical price of $237.50. Weeks later, the dot-com bubble burst and Yahoo eventually fell to an all time trading low of $8.02! As of this hour, it sits at a comfortable $32.30 though Yahoo had to fight and claw its way back to prominence in a dark period between 2000 and 2002 when the online advertising market regained momentum lost after the bubble burst.

Yahoo has grown very rapidly over the past two years since it acquired Inktomi in March 2003 and Overture, which then owned Alta Vista and AlltheWeb months later in July 2003. The purchase of Inktomi (along with the additions of Alta Vista and AlltheWeb), gave Yahoo the tools they needed to design their own algorithmic search engine that they released early last year. The purchase of Overture gave Yahoo the foothold they needed to challenge Google in the growing Pay-per-Click search-distribution market.

Today, Yahoo is the largest of the major search firms serving over 237-million unique users in 13 different languages. It has 25 regional offices based on every populated continent and is considered one of the leaders in Local search. It announced yesterday that it would merge all search services it currently offers under the brand-name Yahoo including the PPC services currently managed by its division, Overture.

Happy Birthday Grampa Yahoo. You've made the last ten years very interesting and look to make the next decade equally interesting.

Added note: Today, another important birthday is being celebrated. My mother is celebrating another in a series of 39th birthdays. Happy Birthday Ma. I love you. Thanks for teaching me to read.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 3:14 PM.

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Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Yahoo! Overture Out. API in. Yahoo merges search services and allows development

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 2:59 PM

Yahoo will be killing the Overture brand name early in the second quarter as it moves to merge all its search services under the same banner. Yahoo also announced the beta version of the Yahoo Developer Network, an Application Program Interface (API) allowing search marketers and software developers to build Yahoo into search related tools they use or create.

Soon to be known as Yahoo! Search Marketing Services, (or likely, Yahoo for short), the re-branding announcement brings Yahoo's advertising and search divisions together under the same name. The opening of Yahoo Developer Network signifies Yahoo's commitment to competing with Google by allowing software developers and search marketers the ability to build time saving tools around the Yahoo! Search Marketing Service. The announcements coincide with Yahoo's tenth birthday and day two of the mammoth Search Engine Strategies Conference currently underway in New York City.

Overture was the original pay per click search tool when it launched in June 1998 under the name GoTo.com. After hiring Ted Meisel as president of Overture later that year, the company successfully marketed the phrase "pay-for-performance" sparking the genesis of today's powerful contextual distribution business model. The company thrived over the next few years, changing its name in late 2001, weeks before announcing its first partnership with Yahoo in November. After a year of rapid growth in 2002, Overture acquired Alta Vista and the search unit of FAST, AlltheWeb in February 2003. In early October 2003, Yahoo purchased Overture and its stable of search technologies, reclaiming its role as a serious contender in the business of search.

Yahoo will be phasing out the name Overture early in the next quarter in the US. After the re-branding effort is complete in the States, it will move to re-brand in international markets with the exception of Japan and South Korea where the Overture name will be maintained.

Advertisers should not see any major changes in policy stemming from this move. It is being done mostly to alleviate confusion between the various brands owned by Yahoo!, and to allow for better internal coordination between product units. If anything, advertisers and search marketers will save time as Yahoo's core services will be accessible from the same page.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions will offer the following services in one suite:

Sponsored Search Listings, the flagship search advertising product
Content Match, Yahoo!'s contextual advertising listings
Local Match, Yahoo!'s local sponsored search offering
Site Match, Self Serve and Site Match Xchange, Yahoo!'s search URL submission products
Yahoo! Product Submit, the Yahoo! Shopping URL submission program
Yahoo! Express, the Yahoo! Directory URL submission program
Marketing Console, which enables advertisers to track campaign performance across multiple online channels
Search Optimizer, which allows advertisers to improve their campaign performance and reduce the amount of time spent managing their listings

"Our mission is to be essential to marketers of all types around the world," said Ted Meisel, who is also Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Inc. in a press release "Unifying all of our search marketing and related products under one banner and one common approach reflects our commitment to integrate and simplify online advertising, allowing businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the Yahoo! search marketing solutions that best fit their marketing goals."

Accompanying the re-branding announcement was the opening of the Yahoo! Developers Network API. Search is recognized as being the essential web-tool. Everything from weather information to airline tickets are found via search tools of one sort or another. Like its rivals, Yahoo offers several types of search tools such as images, maps, news, and video on top of general website search. By opening its own API, Yahoo is inviting web developers to build Yahoo search services directly into the products they create. For example, a Star Trek Enterprise fan-site could build a Yahoo powered search tool that finds video relating to quotes about the series. Similarly, a Phoenix Suns fan could create an on-site application that calls video clips of the brilliant point-guard Steve Nash. Marketers can build tools tracking specific campaigns and smaller search tools can combine their look and feel with Yahoo's massive database to produce industry-specific results (vertical search) for unique business sectors.

Yahoo's hard work to rebuild its brand strength against Google is slowly paying off with rises in market share and customer loyalty. By clearing up confusion between the brand names Overture and Yahoo and opening the hood to allow users to create their own versions of core products, Yahoo has given web searchers and marketers the gifts of clarity and empowerment. Ultimately it has given itself a gift of greater presence. Happy Birthday Yahoo!. Here's to another ten years.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 2:59 PM.

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Jeff Raskin - Developer of GUI

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 1:06 PM

The computer I am using is usable becuase of Jeff Raskin, one of the original Apple employees who died yesterday at the age of 63.

Raskin is widely credited as the innovator of the Graph User Interface first seen by computer users on the Apple Macintosh. Raskin also invented the click-and-drag selection/file-manipulation process. Raskin's contributions to personal computer usage are now part of our daily habits. His death marks the passing of person who changed our world.

On behalf of those who never met you, "thanks Jeff".

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 1:06 PM.